"Obaba" entre los 100 universos literarios más importantes de la historia

"Literary Wonderlands: A Journey Through the Greatest Fictional Worlds Ever Created" (Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers. New York, 2016), así es como se titula el trabajo elaborado por un grupo de experto editores, guiados y dirigidos por Laura Miller. En un libro que destaca por su rigor y su cuidada edición, los autores han reunido los universos de ficción más destacables de la historia de la literatura.

Son 100 obras las que componen la elección de los editores, entre los que encontraremos obras claves de la historia de la literatura, todos ellos bien conocidos por los lectores, como por ejemplo, La Odisea, Don Quijote, Alicia en el país de las maravillas, Los viajes de Gulliver, El señor de los anillos, Cien años de soledad, Pedro Páramo, Harry Potter,... Y junto a todas estas obras maestras de la literatura universal, encontraremos también Obabakoak (Atxaga, 1988) y el mundo literario creado por el escritor vasco en la localidad literaria de Obaba.

Literary Wonderlands

Se puede consultar la portada y el índice del libro, así como el apartado dedicado a Obaba, en el siguiente PDF. He aquí algunos extractos:

Obabakoak (1988)
A collection of interrelated stories about life and the stories people tell, including that of the narrator's childhoood in an imaginary Basque-speaking town, featuring a whirlwind of sleuthing, storytelling, and dialogue about literature and myth-making in "big" and "small" cultures.
(...)
The map of Atxaga's creative interior, his inner-life, shows an author who jumps over frontiers between literature and orality, Basque and non-Basque, different audiences and aesthetics -- pre-, post-, and modern.

"Literary Wonderlands" (Miller, 2016)
Literary Wonderlands is a thoroughly researched, wonderfully written, and beautifully produced book that spans two thousand years of creative endeavor. From Spenser's The Fairie Queene to Wells's The Time Machine to Murakami's 1Q84 it explores the timeless and captivating features of fiction's imagined worlds including the relevance of the writer's own life to the creation of the story, influential contemporary events and philosophies, and the meaning that can be extracted from the details of the work. Each piece includes a detailed overview of the plot and a "Dramatis Personae." Literary Wonderlands is a fascinating read for lovers of literature, fantasy, and science fiction.

Laura Miller is the book's general editor. Co-founder of Salon.com, where she worked as an editor and writer for 20 years, she is currently a books and culture columnist at Slate. A journalist and a critic, her work has appeared in the New Yorker, Harper's, the Guardian, and the New York Times Book Review, where she wrote the "Last Word" column for two years. She is the author of The Magician's Book: A Skeptic's Adventures in Narnia and editor of the Salon.com Reader's Guide to Contemporary Authors.